Rediscovering Cyberspace
I used social media for years, quitting when I realized it was making my life worse. I didn’t need to know what my friends were doing all day, it wasn’t connection but noise.
World news feeds weren’t much better. They left me anxious and angry. I never felt like I was more educated on a topic discussed, nor did I feel like I had talking points if they were brought up in my day-to-day life.
So, without the news (and all its depression) and without social media (with all its facades and distractions) what was I to do with the internet? It felt empty and hollow. The net of my youth felt like a whole world outside the physical one, but now it was as bountiful as an abandoned building.
Scrolling through Hacker News, I found a link to a blog by Steve Dylan, and read Steve’s posts about Resurrect The Old Web. I was immediately enthralled. I read Herman's blog as well, and was inspired to check out the BearBlog platform.
I was goddamned ecstatic.
Reading posts on the platform felt new, fresh, and gave me a wonderful feeling I haven’t felt from the internet in a really long time. It lacked any of the engineered algorithmic time sinks I felt exhausted by.
A book that is near and dear to my heart, Neuromancer, depicted cyberspace as a wild data-scape, a place of the mind, unadulterated by the physical world. A “consensual hallucination experienced by billions everyday”.
I wanted to pay homage to that a bit by carving out a little corner of my own cyberspace, reading, writing, and rediscovering what the internet maybe should have been.